Devlog 02 - The Sounds of Frustration

For my first time launching a build, it went very successfully. I got some valuable feedback, and am now a lot more used to the process than I was a few weeks ago.

I started the week gathering feedback from various players, and to everyone who played the build, thank you.

I also began compiling a major list of everything I wanted to do before the next build. Specifically, I wanted to further improve the player, start messing around with UI elements, and improve enemies. On the sidelines, I started work on another player design, this one incorporating the gun directly into her sprite rather than as a separate object. Will I regret this later? Probably. Does it make other aspects easier now? Yes it does.

There were 2 other big things I wanted to really think about during this time: A better name for the project, and one other mechanic I could add to her kit.

I...then avoided the project for a week and played Pokemon, which in hindsight was pretty irresponsible, but it gave me a lot of time to think.

Once that week was up, I immediately jumped into the first thing that I wanted to fix, and that was the lack of a way to actually quit the game.

In response, I created a fairly basic main menu and pause screen (that totally didn't take me 3 hours to code). I also made it so that the targets couldn't be stood on or directly collided with, as well as bumping up the walk speed, jump height, and fall speed.

While I was watching my brother play through Mega Man 7, he complained that Megaman "took up so much of the screen". Remembering other games like Hollow Knight and Celeste, I realized that my player character was a little too big, so I scaled up the camera a bit so she took up less of the screen.

After fixing a few other bugs that cropped up, I packed it up for one night.

The next time I opened up the project, I began tackling my enemy system again, this time with a more solid idea on how to get it working. An hour later, my system was up and running...sort of. They could definitely move around and were affected by gravity, that was for certain, but it was still really buggy. The enemies would avoid me instead of getting closer (but only sometimes), and the falling was at a set velocity. I wanted incrimental velocity to make it feel like real gravity. Needless to say, it needed more work.

The next day was just bugfixing. I got my enemies following me after correcting some math (I was trying to do this by finding the distance between the player and the enemy, normalizing it, and seeing if it was positive or negative. However, it turns out I was never calculating distance, but just the position in relation to the center of the world, which is why they only sometimes followed me), and got them affected by gravity, which took longer than I'm willing to admit to implement, and caused a weird bug where the enemies would violently clip through the floor. Now all that was left was to get the enemies attacking me.

Currently, the enemies attack me once per frame, which we don't really want as it eats our health (and is also just bad practice), so instead, I put the attack on a simple timer and created a basic animation that would be timed to the attack.

Now, this is also somewhat bad practice, and it would be better to just tie the attack directly to the animation, but I've spent too much time on this now and need to get other things done.

I also created some more environmental assets, including some tufts of grass which were originally intended to be spikes, but kind of look better this way, as well as a trash can, some fences, and an updated look for the targets to help them mesh better with the game.

You may have also noticed that I've started varying between a few shades of purple. I think this makes the game look a lot better overall, even if it takes away a little from the aesthetic.

My next step was adding a landing particle effect, which was a really small detail but made it a little more juicy. Additionally, I implemented a health bar which totally wasn't ripped off of Persona, and at this point, I was feeling confident. In a span of less than 12 hours, I'd accomplished a huge chunk of the list of things I wanted to do. "Nothing can go wrong" I thought.

Never learned that lesson, because then it came time to implement sound effects.

To put my problem lightly, my computer can't register microphone inputs, meaning...it can't recieve sound...

I worked around this by digging out my old laptop again and using that (which, for some reason, records audio at an incredibly low volume), but this will definitely be a problem for the future of this project, but for now, I had a solution, and it worked.

The other thing that softened the blow is that I could still modify the sound from my PC, which meant I just had to record the sounds from my laptop, transfer them to my PC, and my laptop wouldn't need to do anything more.

I took an hour or so figuring out how to record the 6 or so sounds I wanted to implement, and after taking the time to edit them, only 2 came out feeling usable. Luckily, they were both related to one another, so it was a bit less awkward. I also set up a sound manager to make my life easier later.

From there, I added my two sound effects. Not *really* completely proud of either of them, but they worked, and I got some new knowledge (go me).

And finally, after ~13 hours of work, I called it a night at 5am. For reference, everything I've written since the enemy damage code was done in that timespan.

Which brings us to today. I decided early in the morning that I'd done enough work to warrant another build, and began writing out this devlog and putting out some finishing touches.

Fun fact: While I was finishing up preparation, I did something in an attempt to make my life a little easier, but it spiraled to the point that the game was playing at 5 FPS. I want to figure out how to get it working in the future, as the thing I was trying to go is going to be necessary later, but for now it's not completely necessary.

For the next build, my really big plan is to add one extra mechanic to the game, and have it be functional. I still don't know what that is yet, but I also plan to take it easy for a few days, so maybe a game or anime will give me a spark of inspiration.

I also still want a more permanent name for the project, as well as some more effects and improving on my enemies, but that's for the next build.

As a postmortem of the build? I wish I didn't have to spend so much time getting enemies to work, and should've focused less on polish and more on functionality. However, some parts of the polishing taught me a lot about how Unity works, and I can use my new knowledge to better develop my game.